BioLogos Selects Woman as New President

The BioLogos Foundation announced on 28 January that Professor Deborah Haarsma has been appointed as the new president of the organization and will assume leadership as current President Darrel Falk transitions out of his role.

Previously, Dr. Haarsma served as Professor of Physics & Astronomy at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. “An experienced research scientist, her work on galaxy clusters and gravitational lenses has been published in The Astrophysical Journal and The Astronomical Journal.”

As Christianity Todaynotes, however, “Haarsma’s work in astronomy is less likely to garner criticism than her views of Scripture, creation, and evolution.” Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis raised concerns about the new BioLogos president, stating that, “BioLogos has chosen a president who denies the authority of Scripture when it comes to Genesis.” Ham shares a video of Haarsma discussing Genesis wherein she states that the first chapter of Genesis

is a message of how God interacts with His creation and of our role in creation. It’s several key theological messages. But it is not a message about the how and the when of creation. God didn’t bother to teach the ancient Hebrews that the world was actually round. He didn’t bother to teach them that it was actually atmosphere in the sky instead of a solid sky dome. He let them keep believing that. He accommodated the message to where they were at. And I find that so comforting to us today that God is willing to accommodate His message to our limited understanding. We don’t have to have a perfect scientific understanding of the world to get God’s message for us. And for that reason, I don’t think we need to draw from Genesis 1 a chronology of how God created, a timeline of specific physical events, but rather these very important theological views. Source

In response, Ham states,

Did you catch that? Dr. Haarsma believes Genesis “is not a message about the how and the when of creation” and that God “accommodated the message to where they [the Israelites] were at.” So she plainly denies that what Scripture says about creation is true, and she thinks that God isn’t capable of communicating an understandable description of literal history to His people! And really she is saying that God is not telling the truth in that He “accommodates” the message to where they are at (or where she believes they were at from her wrong view of history). Source

This recent appointment of Haarsma seems to indicate that BioLogos has no intention of altering its views surrounding creation and likely will continue to promote theistic evolution as it seeks to counter those who believe in a literal interpretation of the Genesis account.